Important processes for photographing are so automated in conventional cameras that amateur camera operators are unlikely to fail in photographing.
More recently, a system that compensates shakes during photographing has been studied. For example, a known system detects user's shakes in the camera, moves a lens in synchronization with the shake, and forms a less vibratory image even with a long exposure time period.
Japanese Patent Application, Publication No. 2000-341577 discloses a method of taking plural images that run short of exposure at such a fast shutter speed that no shake occurs, and synthesizes them into a less oscillatory, properly exposed image.
Most of the recent digital cameras serve to display a taken image on a liquid crystal display (“LCD”) on a back surface of the camera for each shot, and display plural thumbnails on the LCD so that a user can select an image to be reproduced among plural taken images.
However, the camera disclosed in the prior art has the following problem: In generating one properly exposed image by synthesizing plural images that are taken with insufficient exposure at such a fast shutter speed that is less subject to camera shakes, a position coordinate of each image is calculated and the images are synthesized based on a shake amount obtained by the shake detecting function. Thus, it takes a long time to display the resultant synthesized image on the LCD, interrupting shooting and losing the best moment to take a good picture in the next shot.
On the other hand, an attempt to display a pre-synthesized image runs with insufficient exposure results in a display of such a dark image that the user has a difficulty in recognizing a composition.